


see you on a dark night (i will wait forever)

by possibilist



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, tw: suicide attempt mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 10:17:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2504228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilist/pseuds/possibilist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>carmilla x laura drabble. the beginnings of how to navigate some kind of forever. angst but mostly fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	see you on a dark night (i will wait forever)

**Author's Note:**

> this very, very briefly mentions a suicide attempt.
> 
> also—if you're looking for a song to absolutely stake you with carmilla x laura feelings, wilen's cover of grimes' 'oblivion' (title & epigraph taken from it, as well) is the place to be.

_** see you on a dark night (i will wait forever) ** _

**_._ **

_& now another clue, i would ask/ if you could help me out/ it’s hard to understand/ because when you're running by yourself/ it’s hard to find someone to hold your hand  
_ —grimes, 'oblivion'

/

It isn’t easy all of the time: Carmilla has some damage to her that not even your massive amounts of exuberance and cocoa can manage to temper; you aren’t always patient or kind.

But you do very much love her, almost despite yourself. You love when you make her laugh, when she climbs in your bed in the dark, early hours of the morning with freezing hands and warm breath and snuggles into your chest. 

Eventually she tells you, very quietly and usually when you pretend to be asleep—she can hear exactly how fast your heart is beating, so it’s a lying protective measure you grant her—about the things that scare her: thunderstorms, the shower sometimes, elevators, Vivaldi’s “Winter”, action films when the rest of the lights are turned off.

Eventually she kisses you like you’re not going to run away.

.

It’s been about a year. In those months, she’s shown you—albeit reluctantly—where she goes at night sometimes: the roof of the library, the middle of the football stadium—really, anywhere with stars, anywhere that breathes. You take her to the seaside in France after your spring finals, watch her relax in the rhythm of the waves. She spends summer in Austria, doing some very pretentious and wordy project that you pay attention to mostly because of her lips, not really much else. You go back home, mostly because of your dad—your hometown is stifling, but you love him, and you have missed him. 

Carmilla comes for a week, though, and it’s awkward, but you sneak into the swimming pool in the middle of the night and strip off everything and make love in that water, everything chlorine and float.

.

Things grow lovelier when you get back: one day you come back to your dorm—back  _home—_ from lunch with Perry and LaFontaine and find your room entirely rearranged so that your two beds are pushed together, headboards joined against the wall, your desk against the other, and a—somewhat dead—vase of poppies on its straightened surface. Everything is remarkably neat, and there’s no note, and Carmilla is nowhere to be seen.

You fall in love, then, very, very coherently. Deeply and with something that breathes, so improbably, like tomorrows.

She gets back late in the evening, after you’d changed into your pajamas. 

You grin, and she rolls her eyes with this sheepish smile. “It’s okay?” she asks.

“Get over here, idiot.”

.

One night in the middle of—and you quote—“the haunt of autumn, buttercup,” she takes you to the roof of the astronomy building, which has a telescope. 

She sits on the edge, dangles her legs, presses forward once and then leans back when she senses, you can guess, your terrified reaction.

“Cupcake,” she says gently, and then takes a bottle of vodka from her bag and takes a long drink before handing it to you. You just hold it rather than drinking anything, but she doesn’t seem to care.

“Do you want—” you swallow. “Have you ever wanted to die?”

She pauses, worries her bottom lip. It’s so human, the gesture, and you sit next to her, swing your legs over the edge. “I’ve jumped a few times,” she tells you. “Hurts like a bitch.”

You’re torn between laughter and a sob, but then she kisses you.

“Not anymore, sweetheart,” she whispers. “I don’t want to jump anymore.”

.

You brush back her bangs as often as she’ll let you: you like the bloom of her face, the tiny glimpse of something like belief left in her eyes. In flashes, even, she looks young.

She has a little scar on her forehead, maybe a centimeter long and not deep at all, and even though she’s reluctantly explained a bit of vampire biology to you, and you know the one little knot on her wrist is from  _After_ , you’re pretty sure vampires don’t get scars. Which means—

“I was six,” she tells you early one morning, just as the sun is starting to shift through the curtains. You trace the tiny scar. “I fell off of the banister, believe it or not, and landed, well, on the stairs.”

It’s such a normal, banal, endearing thing to be hurt by that it almost breaks your chest in that moment, because in some other life, hundreds of years ago, Carmilla was a little girl who dreamed of so much more than lost loves and torture and some abject terror and helplessness. A little girl who blushed and dreamed. A little girl who had a heartbeat.

“My mother had a fit,” she continues before you can say anything, and then she laughs a little, and you look up at her, realize this is precious—hearing her talk about her human family. “I was the oldest, the prettiest.” She rolls her eyes at your grin. “And a scar was terrible news for my future prospects.”

“This little thing?”

“She was a bit dramatic,” she says. 

You trace the scar again, and then she tugs your hand very gently down to her mouth and kisses your palm.

“I was also the smartest,” she says, “which no one cared about at the time, but it’s why—it’s how—”

She looks distraught, all of a sudden, and there’s a list of things you know not to ask Carmilla about,  _ever_ —not because she’s being withdrawn or sarcastic or stubborn, but because she  _cannot_ talk about them.

“Also the  _gayest_ ,” you say, and she laughs a little soggily and kisses the top of your head before bringing her lips to yours. 

“It has its benefits, I suppose.”

.

You catch her one day, tracing her fingers over the lace of a small handkerchief. She tries to hide it when you come in, but you just shake your head and go about your daily routine of organizing your homework into priority piles. 

After a few minutes, she says, “Don’t take this to mean I’m not over a girl who’s been dead for almost 150 years, but this—this was Elle’s.”

You climb into bed—you’d dragged her with you to IKEA and gotten a big fluffy duvet as well as more pillows, but the faithful yellow sham was smushed somewhere behind her back. You reach toward the tiny bit of fabric scrunched in her fingers and she hands it over tenderly, without flinching.

“What was she like?”

Carmilla smiles wistfully. “Beautiful. Kind, smart. Brave. Like you, in some of the best ways, only, you know, less of an idiot.”

You take it as a compliment, because, “The vampire thing?”

She snatches back the handkerchief and nods, places it back into the bottom of that godforsaken duffel bag. “I love you more,” she says.

You’re almost taken aback at the admission—you’ve said  _I love you_ so many times, and she’s returned it eventually, but never quite like this.

“Baby,” you say, and she shakes her head and kisses you deeply.

“I love you more,” she whispers again, and it’s desperation and release at once.

.

“What are you—after you graduate, do you have any—”

She shrugs. “Despite some tempting offers from Harvard and Cambridge, I figure another master’s in Women’s Studies from Silas wouldn’t be too terrible.”

You take a moment to fight back tears because that means—

“I really am kind of stuck with you, cupcake, you realize that?”

You shake your head and kiss her, because eternity is stretched before you, and her perfect skin and still heart are just under your fingertips and your brain spins in conflict and  _want_ for these things, for her.

But for now, she says, “And I figure we can spring for off-campus housing. Maybe even a real bed.”

You can’t help but smile.

.

She doesn’t fall through on her promise for a real bed—in fact, the entire apartment is surprisingly open and sun-drenched, and when you say as much, she just ducks her head in embarrassment and says, reluctantly, “It just—felt like you.”

It’s two blocks away from campus, and, while your dad isn’t the biggest fan of the idea, he has known Carmilla for a while now, and he trusts her implicitly, you know. 

You spend your first night there tacking up glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling above your bed—because if Carmilla gathers the light for you, you’ll be damned if you don’t give her the same forgiveness.

.

“We’ve a few years,” she tells you, “before—”

“I know,” you say.

"I—I'll never ask you to, but—I—I  _would_  do it, whatever you want—I would—"

"I know," you tell her again—and you do; you think about it when you’re touching her perfect skin, when you search for a heartbeat and never find one—how she's so spectacular you might want that too, to hold her for centuries, to see the world. “I want—just, I know.”

She swallows and it's a smile the lilts slightly: it means enough of a forever for now. The sun drifts.


End file.
